“Name five things they got wrong”

When I first hear or meet scholars committed to a comprehensive intellectual system, usually named after a person, I like to ask them a simple question (sometimes I do actually ask it, sometimes it’s only in my head): “Name five things they got wrong.” In other words, if you’re a Thomist or an Augustinian, a Rawlsian or a Schmittian, before I hear anything else about what you think, much less how your system solves my problems and answers all my questions, I want to hear how its namesake was fallible. If no answer is forthcoming, then I’m going to have a hard time taking anything else you say seriously.

I once heard John Hare, a committed Kantian and distinguished professor of philosophy at Yale (and, full disclosure, one of my own teachers), give a talk at a conference in which he began by listing four serious ways in which Kant erred in his philosophy. The rhetorical effect was powerful. It put the audience in a particular place: no longer were we preparing, perhaps reluctantly or suspiciously, to hear a zealous prophet of the Master deliver a timeless Word from the Inerrant One; we were now eager to learn from a fellow co-seeker of the truth, who happened to have found in Kant a useful aid for the journey.

The practice isn’t only rhetorically useful; it helps devotees of systems more generally, I think. “Calvin didn’t get everything right” is a kind of spiritual and mental hygiene for Reformed theologians. Call it an epistemic cleanse. All thinkers and writers should agree to this basic practice, or principle, but certainly Christians who believe in original sin should be the first to sign up for it.

The principle applies elsewhere, too. A Christian who says “My politics are exactly those of the DNC/GOP, plus Jesus” should immediately arouse suspicion, all the more so if the party advocate argues either that such politics are coterminous with Christian ethics or that this fact is obvious (or both). Whenever I meet Christians who are committed members of an American political party, the first thing I want to hear out of their mouths is, “Granted, I disagree with the platform on X, Y, and Z,” followed by, “but on the whole, I think the common good would be served best with them in power rather than the other guys.” That’s a perfectly reasonable position and can be defended variously and coherently. What can’t be defended is, “The ever-evolving platform of my party lacks any flaws,” much less, “My party’s platform is God’s political will written—a fact that should plain as day to any open-eyed believer.”

Now that’s nonsense on stilts, and anybody who’s not already a political hack can admit it. Epistemic humility is a tonic in politics as it is everywhere else. And in terms of honesty with oneself as well as the capacity to persuade others, there’s no substitute for principled and explicit fallibilism.